The earliest iteration of the biggest western MMO, World of Warcraft, splits the difference on the whole chosen one thing. You and thirty nine other players are needed to kill the biggest bad guys, and you get flavor text(that most don't read) saying "Good job hero!", possibly acknowledging that it was a group effort.
Then in later versions you become an extremely consequential supporting character to the writers' pet heroes. A lot of players prefer old school WoW. One reason, even though most don't realize it, is that the awful storytelling of WoW is mostly in the background in the initial version of the game (with less terrible voice acting). Instead, it really is about the "World".
David Brin’s The Postman was a reaction to Mad Max style apocalyptic fiction: the survivalists are the bad guys and the hero is a guy who takes a dead mailman’s shirt and bag and tries to bring back order and civilization, initially by delivering the mail.
The links to Western civilisation collapsing once, twice, three times don't work for me; possibly because I'm outside the USA? You've piqued my curiosity.
"But note that this is also a bit of a rebuke to the dominant strain of prepper fantasies, such as those I began this review with. Prepper fantasies are most fundamentally fantasies of agency, dreams that in the right crisis the actions you take could actually matter, and that in the wake of that crisis you could retvrn to a Rousseauian condition of autonomous activity freed from the internal conflicts engendered by societal oppression (whether that oppression takes the form of stifling social convention or HRified bureaucratic fiat)."
Something similar can be said about lefty intellectuals, sure that come The Revolution, they'll be the ones with the whip hand.
This is one of my favorite essays on the Stack. It caught my attention because Graff was one of my East Asian history teachers at Kansas State, and I respect the man greatly. But it also summarized an insight into order and culture that the Asians have that we try to escape from. Brilliant.
The earliest iteration of the biggest western MMO, World of Warcraft, splits the difference on the whole chosen one thing. You and thirty nine other players are needed to kill the biggest bad guys, and you get flavor text(that most don't read) saying "Good job hero!", possibly acknowledging that it was a group effort.
Then in later versions you become an extremely consequential supporting character to the writers' pet heroes. A lot of players prefer old school WoW. One reason, even though most don't realize it, is that the awful storytelling of WoW is mostly in the background in the initial version of the game (with less terrible voice acting). Instead, it really is about the "World".
"Making all things correspond to what they should"--is there anything more Chinese than that?
This phrasing is also extremely Egyptian (as in Pharaonic Ancient Egypt).
David Brin’s The Postman was a reaction to Mad Max style apocalyptic fiction: the survivalists are the bad guys and the hero is a guy who takes a dead mailman’s shirt and bag and tries to bring back order and civilization, initially by delivering the mail.
The links to Western civilisation collapsing once, twice, three times don't work for me; possibly because I'm outside the USA? You've piqued my curiosity.
Weird! They link, in order, to: Gibbon's Decline and Fall; Eric Cline's 1177 BC; Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue.
Fall of Rome, Late Bronze Age Collapse, the Enlightenment (he sees it as a bad thing).
"But note that this is also a bit of a rebuke to the dominant strain of prepper fantasies, such as those I began this review with. Prepper fantasies are most fundamentally fantasies of agency, dreams that in the right crisis the actions you take could actually matter, and that in the wake of that crisis you could retvrn to a Rousseauian condition of autonomous activity freed from the internal conflicts engendered by societal oppression (whether that oppression takes the form of stifling social convention or HRified bureaucratic fiat)."
Something similar can be said about lefty intellectuals, sure that come The Revolution, they'll be the ones with the whip hand.
This is one of my favorite essays on the Stack. It caught my attention because Graff was one of my East Asian history teachers at Kansas State, and I respect the man greatly. But it also summarized an insight into order and culture that the Asians have that we try to escape from. Brilliant.